So many of my current causes, projects and interventions in the Parliament of Canada have a single common denominator - the urgent need to transform the United Nations System, to make it more accountable and more responsive to the collective needs, and rights, of the world's citizens. A UN Parliamentary Assembly would be an important step in the right direction.

Roméo Dallaire, Canadian Senator, former force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, 2008

The Pan-African Parliament ... stresses the potential of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly to increase the efficiency, transparency and democratic character of the United Nations and international co-operation; ... notes that in a first preliminary step [the assembly] could be composed of national parliamentarians, but that eventually it should be directly elected by universal adult suffrage.

Pan-African Parliament, From a resolution in support of a UN Parliamentary Assembly adopted by the Pan-African Parliament on October 24, 2007

We need to promote the democratization of globalization, before globalization destroys the foundations of national and international democracy. The establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the UN has become an indispensable step to achieve democratic control of globalization.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former UN Secretary-General, 2007

A parliament at the United Nations would symbolize the notion of humanity as a community of world citizens.

Günter Grass, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2006

We are struggling badly in the world, and we have not adopted a proper solution to our problems. In order to have a globally organized world, we also need global structures. We need a global parliament.

Lech Wałęsa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-founder of Solidarność and President of Poland 1990-95, 2004

Parliamentary oversight of the multilateral system at the global level should be progressively expanded. We propose the creation of a Parliamentary Group concerned with the coherence and consistency between global economic, social and environmental policies, which should develop an integrated oversight of major international organizations.

Tarjo Halonen, From the report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization co-chaired by Tarjo Halonen, President of Finland (in the picture), and Benjamin Mkapa, President of Tanzania, 2004

In the future, I see a World Parliament in which every human being will be represented by a process of free elections. It will foster a culture of peace in which war will be unthinkable. It will promote an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimensions of human beings.

Frank K. Kelly, Author and peace activist, founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, speechwriter for U.S. presidential campaigns, 2002

Power exists at the international level whether we like it or not. A parliament for the planet is not a question of removing further powers from nation-states or from their citizens, but of democratizing those powers that are already being wielded supranationally.

George Monbiot, English writer, columnist and political activist, 2002

As more and more issues increasingly demand global solutions ... we need to strengthen institutions for global decision-making and make them more responsible to the people they affect. This line of thought leads in the direction of a world community with its own directly elected legislature.

Peter Singer, Moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, 2002

The United Nations would probably have to rest on two pillars: one constituted by an assembly of equal executive representatives of individual countries, resembling the present plenary, and the other consisting of a group elected directly by the globe's population in which the number of delegates representing individual nations would, thus, roughly correspond to the size of the nations.

Václav Havel, President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), 2000